John Rea: The Composers’ Fund
Project Title: | təʊl |: a work for immersive soundscape and percussion.
Project Bio: | təʊl | (the phonetic spelling of ‘toll’) will be a realisation of an immersive audio-visual performance work of 35 to 40 minutes, in collaboration with the percussionist Dame Evelyn Glennie. the soundworld is based on an ambisonic field-recording of the call to service bell of Nantgwyllt Church in Cwm Elan, alongside ‘sonic cartographic’ underwater recordings captured in specific locations, such as Aberdyfi harbour, and ‘Caban Coch’ reservoir. Building on an initial ‘R&D’ iteration, my intention is to explore our relationship with the bell: and to create a spectral work and immersive experience that will combine multi-channel sound with original composition, featuring composed and part-improvised musical responses. Presented in a black box space, | təʊl | will be both an experiential, immersive performance and a continuously evolving audio-visual installation. I am currently in discussions with the cymbalsmith Matt Nolan about the design and creation of eight unique bell plate percussion instruments, tuned to the partials of the Elan bell, as a unique and powerful element of the soundworld. Our relationship with water has a strong resonance; it is significant that the submerging of land is a recurring theme in our mythology and modern history.
Artist Bio: Despite my background is as a composer of ‘pure music’ for concert platform, theatre and film; I have always felt an urge to integrate conceptual themes and ideas into my work. An early example is ‘Breakbeat’; a work for string orchestra, two turntables and dub delay, which has a visual performance element at its core; or ‘DISCO CONCRÈTE’: a Ffotogallery commission for Diffusion Festival of Lens based arts: an installation work celebrating the work of the musique conctrète pioneers. My recent work is the same, only more so: shifting between compositional narrative and sound, with an added and new fascination with integrating spoken word, particularly Welsh dialects, spatial presentation, and the development of a visual language. Extra-musical ideas, as exemplified by the work ‘| təʊl |’ and ‘Atgyfodi’ are the inevitable end result of this journey, which take advantage of emerging modes of immersive presentation. I am very excited to be collaborating with the distinguished percussionist Dame Evelyn Glennie on the full realisation of the next phase of the work.